What I Do At Work

This is an archived post
This is an archived post

Using JAMF's new NetBoot/SUS virtual appliance in Parallels for Mac 7

Hater's gonna hate, but I much prefer Parallels Desktop for Mac over VMware Fusion. It's always been faster for me, and that holds true even today, so I continue to use it instead.

That being said, it doesn't support the Open Virtualization Format out of the box, so using JAMF's newly released NetBoot/SUS virtual appliance within Parallels Desktop requires some additional steps besides just dragging and dropping the supplied OVA file into Paralells.

After you use VMWare's tool to convert the OVA to a native pair of VMware VMDK/VMX files, simply open Parallels Desktop for Mac and choose File>>Open and select the VMX file that was created from the initial conversion. NOTE: The VMDK file must be in the same location as the VMX file. Ex: If the VMX file is on the desktop, the VMDK file also needs to be on the desktop.

From there, Parallels will proceed to import and convert the VMWare style VM. You will get a warning about not being able to detect the guest OS. Just click proceed as once the conversion is finished it will properly detect that it's Ubuntu.